Recent blog entries by mishan

It's been long enough that it's time for another of my status updates here on Advogato.

Work
I've been working for Tagged, Inc. (tagged.com) since November 2009. Tagged is a social networking company with a twist -- we're aimed much more at what we refer to as "social discovery." We enable anyone to socialize and meet with new people. It's a great network for making friends online and offline. We've also got a rapidly growing games department with our own in-house game designers and developers that create high-quality games that are well integrated into the site -- a lot of people on the site are there just for games, a lot are there for making friends and perhaps life-long lasting friendships or even relationships.

Since Tagged is aimed at allowing people to more easily connect with essentially strangers, it doesn't take a large stretch of imagination to realize that spam can be a much bigger issue to deal with than on some sites.

Spam is an issue that's always annoyed me and peaked my curiosity as far as trying to stop it, so I volunteered to join the Anti-Spam/Site Security team over there. We've been quite successful thus far in eliminating most of the site's spam and are working hard on improving account security, overall user experience, all while trying to reduce spam levels even further. Some of our systems are so good at figuring out a spammer that it can predict a spammer before I can even judge an account personally.

This year has been going phenomenally for us and we are rapidly growing and looking for talented people who are interested in working at an awesome startup and facing new, interesting challenges and problems. If you are interested, check out http://about-tagged.com/jobs to see what positions we have open!

Free Software
Unfortunately I haven't had much time to work on FOSS projects. I've worked on a bunch of little personal projects that could potentially be useful to others but as is are probably of limited use for the moment.

I've been really getting into the whole Android scene. I started off with an Android Dev Phone 1 (G1) and have since bought a G2 and Asus EEE Pad Transformer (TF101). These devices are awesome once rooted/fully unlocked. I've been trying really hard to come up with an idea for a neat app to write but so far the well of my imagination has been dry of ideas. It will be interesting once Android 3.5 drops as right now there appears to be a huge split between Android 2.3.4 and Android 3.1. It will be interesting to see how Google will marry the differences between these systems and how open source projects like CyanogenMod will adopt the new Android OS and what new features/changes will come along.

It's funny -- several years ago if you were in some meeting you might find a lot of people with laptops. Now I find for many the smart phone has replaced the need to have a laptop at meetings -- in some ways it even seems like less of a distraction with its smaller form-factor. I never imagined how these smart phones would change the world. I can't imagine life without my trusty Android phone these days.

Hobbies
The last few years I've really gotten into working on my car. It started off with doing basic maintenance and tune-up and quickly progressed into looking for ways to boost performance both engine and handling-wise. Soon I found myself going to autocrosses with my car and seeking lessons with experienced race car drivers.

I also got into the moped craze for a while, owned eight mopeds at some point and modded a lot of them to go pretty fast before realizing those things are death machines with their weak frames, shoddy suspensions, and underspec'd brakes. So, I got a motorcycle that was quite a bit of a fixer-upper but is a pretty good ride now.

So I'm now officially a hobbyist gear-head. I'm always thinking of ways to marry my passion for computers and open source software with my gear-head hobby. On my track Integra I run a full piggy-back Engine Control Unit that is completely configurable/tunable via USB and has great real-time data display but unfortunately the software is proprietary and requires an installation of Windows to use =\ Short of converting my car over to MegaSquirt (which I don't really want to get into with this car due to it needing to pass smog), I'm stuck with the Hondata s300, which I admit is a wonderful piece of hardware and some great software to match. I just wish they made the software free (as in speech.)

I'm done with school now and have a B.S. in Computer
Science (BSCS). It's refreshing to not have to go to school
and take exams anymore!

Life

Life has been quite hectic lately.. Last year, I had
several surgeries and broke my wrist which required several
orthopedic surgeries. I ended up being on disability leave
from work for a while =\

The tail end of last year was great as Diana, my love,
and I got married on October 9th, 2008.

Right now I'm looking for a software engineering gig, so
if you're an employer and need a Linux specialist who is a
C/C++ software engineer, maybe you should email me and I'll
get you my resume =)

Work

Throughout my time at UCSC, I worked at Packet Design
during the summers and part-time all school year. I had a
good 4 years there working on their software in C++ as well
as writing serial console and web GUIs in Perl for their
appliances until a Google recruiter eyed me open for an SRE
(Site Reliability Engineering) position which I foolishly
took when it was finally offered after the interview
process. The job had little to do with software engineering,
was more of a bunch of administrative number
crunching/planning and IT/SysOps work. After nearly two
years I said enough is enough and am now seeking a better
career path.

Software

Haven't had any time throughout college to really hack on
any free software projects. We abandoned thinksynth sometime
in 2004 or so. I got to write a lot of cool code in some of
my college classes but nothing too exciting/new in the free
software world.

School
Santa Cruz has been really great so far. I took an accelerated introductory computer science course last quarter to test the proverbial waters and get into the frame of mind of university CS classes. This quarter I am taking "Introduction to Computer Organization" which covers computer architectures and involves MIPS and HC11 assembly programming. The class is not too difficult, but the labs take many hours to complete.

Softwarethinksynth is going really well. We have it using ALSA MIDI now and one can actually hook up MIDI devices such as keyboards, as well as software MIDI sequenceres, to it and get it to play notes. The synthesizer portion has been split into a library and current efforts are concentrated on fixing current bugs and optimization.

Someone finally offered to take over GtkHx, so I handed off admin access on the Sourceforge site.

So I graduated high school almost two months ago and turned 18 less than a month ago. I've been really busy lately working for this startup as a summer job. This fall I will begin my education at UC Santa Cruz.

Software
I haven't really been working much on thinksynth lately, with all the coding I have to do at work. We have the synthesizer parsing its language and making cool sounds, but the current plan is to make it into a library so that frontends will be convenient to write.

I've been playing a lot of NetHack lately; it's such an addictive game.

Computer Science
I finished the AI course at my school. Scheme was our primary language of programming and we had an Othello tournament in which our Othello AIs competed in. I'm currently taking a class in Computational Geometry and it is quite interesting. I've decided to take a break from Scheme and code in C++. I've written a lot of stuff in Scheme lately.. Functional programming is quite interesting.

Software
A lot of work done on the software synthesizer my friend and I are writing. We had it working and producing some music (no graphical frontend though) at one point, but we decided to rewrite the engine completely in C++ so that it would be a lot easier to design and maintain in the future. The current engine in C++, although much cleaner, isn't working yet. I've also completely halted development on GtkHx as Hotline is a dead-end and I no longer wish to spend my time working on this dead-end project. Although I've received an offer for it to be taken over, no one has stepped up to the plate yet.